Equivalent trade
by Chibi Haku
Summary: His eyes are wide, frightened, and his pupils dilate as he looks unseeingly around the calm walls of his office, late at night while no one else is ever around. (Themes)


It comes out of the gloom, strikes him down and wraps its steely talons about his brain.

_Murderer... Murderer... murderer._

"NO! I'm not! I never was!" Screaming, turbulence, the world shook around him, as he clutches both sides of his head, his fingers sliding slightly on his ebony black hair. His eyes are wide, frightened, and his pupils dilate as he looks unseeingly around the calm walls of his office, late at night while no one else is ever around.

_Killer, destroyer, breaker of families._

"NO!" He cries! His desperation for that denial to be truth echoes in his voice, as his hands grip tighter, and his back bows. And his pen slips from his fingers and rolls with a soft rattle, rattle thud across the floor and strikes the wall. A creak of the chair meets this shift of the weight, and the shadows appear to loom.

There! Behind the pot plant! His eyes dart, but the moving shadow, though large, holds no answers to the creature lurking in his office, the invader of his privacy. There! Behind the couch! Out the window, by that tree! There! The ceiling fan! The table! The cabinetthedeskthepictureframethedoorknob... Where! Where is it?

_I'm here! Murderer! It's your fault! All your fault. _

His eyes dash, all about the room, looking, looking, searching straining, not finding a thing to where the creature is, even as he utters another "No." But it's feeble now, afraid, because he knows, that maybe, just maybe the answer is 'yes.'

_Your fault! A girl is an orphan and it's your fault!_

"No." he barely even mumbles now, his hands relaxing their grip on the sides of his head, and sliding dejectedly to thump on his desk. His head joins them a minute later, and his eyes spy a frame to one side of the papers littering the wooden surface. And there's a smiling whiskered face peering back at him through square glasses.

_It's all your fault. All yours. You don't deserve to live. Murderer._

"No." Whimpered this time, pleaded even, as his hands reach toward the frame, but the position that his body is in means that it's millimetres too far away, and he can't reach it no matter how hard he tries. In his dazed state, he doesn't even realise to shift his body that fraction so that he may be able to grip onto the frame, hold onto his lifeline. The claws sink into both sides of his head once more, but this time they're not claws, but tendrils of poisonous rose thorns, stabbing, holding, binding.

_You don't deserve to live, murderer. You don't deserve to live._

"Yes." He replies, and his hands, shaking, reach towards the bottom drawer of his desk. He gently slides it open, and it soundlessly moves, and there's no-one here to stop him this time, as the cold, black metal shaft of the regulation pistol is pressed up against his jugular vein. No-one here to stop him as he flicks off the safety latch and gently squeezes, not pulls, the trigger, just as he was trained to.

"Click" Is all the answer the trigger gives, and the click is enough to snap him out of the daze. With a frightened yelp he throws the gun to the side of the room and refuses to look at it. He hears a sigh, and looks up, and there's another in the room, another with long, blonde hair, and a red cloak pulled over what appears to be light cotton Pyjamas.

"You can't shoot that thing without bullets." Comes a snappish and uncomfortable explanation, and the boy has a look on his face that he's never seen on anyone before. An unrecognisable emotion flicks across the boy's eyes.

"How did you know?" He replies, and already his voice is calming, and he's slipping on a mask.

The other gives a dry snort, and casts his eyes to the picture frame at the desk, studying it incredulously. "If I told you who, you wouldn't believe me, but someone important said so this morning." He turned and walked out.

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The next day it's as if nothing happened, and they're back to their old enmity. But there's something new between them, because they've both saved the other's life at least once, and that's not a debt that can be repaid.

Such is Equivalent Trade.

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_A/n: I re-watched Episode 14 today, and I was struck with inspiration halfway through, and actually turned it off so I could write this._

_Okay, that long chain of words is MEANT to be like that before someone bites my head off._

_Review and feed a hungry Authoress? -puppydog eyes-_


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